The home secretary, Sajid Javid, is preparing a Conservative party leadership bid and has found the issue to be a reliable way of generating headlines.
Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images

Sajid Javid’s warning social media companies face “serious consequences” if they don’t keep users safe marks one of the biggest incursions by the Home Office into the world of media regulation since the issue was hived off from the department in the 1990s.

The online harms white paper meshes together the work of officials at the Home Office, who have been pushing for a tough crackdown on tech companies from a law enforcement perspective, and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) staff who traditionally regulate the media.

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“The reason why it’s been done together is it’s targeting the same companies with different harms,” said an insider involved in the negotiations. “It’s divided in Whitehall but the whole point is to encapsulate it in one document.”

The end result is one of the most ambitious attempts by a national government to regulate the internet, despite concerns that it could result in state censorship.

Javid’s department had led on topics involving terrorism and child sexual exploitation, the latter influenced by a briefing from the police’s child exploitation and online protection command last year which he said “frightened the hell out of him”. By contrast, sections on the effect of algorithms and social media’s impact on mental health have been largely developed by the DCMS.

Despite some DCMS officials reportedly having to spell out the more technical details on why some policies would be unworkable to their Home Office counterparts, both departments have publicly insisted there was relative harmony in the production of the document, which has sat on ice for weeks waiting for a gap in the political agenda.

Instead, Conservative aides point to the straightforward language contained in the party’s 2017 manifesto as providing the guiding principles. Although largely overlooked due to the dominance of Brexit as a political issue, the manifesto made it clear the Tories were preparing to crackdown on web companies.

“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” the document stated. “We disagree.”

Quick guide

Online harms white paper

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What is being proposed?

A regulator will be tasked with ensuring online companies meet a new "duty of care" to their users. That regulator, which may be a new body, or a pre-existing organisation such as Ofcom given new powers, would have the power to issue significant fines against technology companies it finds in breach. For serious harms, or for repeat offenders, it can go further still, and hold individual managers criminally liable, or even demand the site be blocked in the UK.

Who welcomes it?

Damian Collins, the chair of the Commons DCMS committee, said he was pleased to see "that the social media companies should have a legal liability to take down harmful content hosted on their platforms".

The NSPCC, which was consulted on the white paper, called it "a hugely significant commitment by the government". The charity's CEO, Peter Wanless, said: "For too long social networks have failed to prioritise children’s safety and left them exposed to grooming, abuse, and harmful content. So it’s high time they were forced to act through this legally binding duty to protect children, backed up with hefty punishments if they fail to do so."

Why is it controversial?

Internet blocking is always a hot button issue, even when it's for harms as serious as online terror or child abuse. But the white paper contains several specific proposals that have left free speech campaigners deeply concerned.

One is the fact that the white paper explicitly addresses not only illegal content, but also content which is "legal but harmful". By requiring online companies to block that content anyway, campaigners argue, the government is outsourcing decisions that should be made by parliament to, at best, an unaccountable regulator, and at worst, the very internet companies that are supposed to be controlled by the legislation.

What's been left out?

There are plenty of online harms that haven't been addressed by the white paper. Little was said about electoral malpractice, for instance: there was no mention of overhauling electoral regulations, something the Electoral Commission first said should be done 15 years ago. Sajid Javid, the home secretary, promised that the Cabinet Office was doing work on that area, and that "not too long from now you'll be hearing about it."

Others noted how limited the legislation was in addressing a multitude of misogynist harm online: "cyber flashing", "revenge porn", and online stalking were all notable by their absence.

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It helps that Javid, himself a former culture secretary, is preparing a Conservative party leadership bid and has found the issue to be a reliable way of generating headlines.

By contrast, the culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, who only took up the post when was shifted from his previous position as the attorney general, has no such ambition to take the top job. Despite showing little obvious interest in the topic of media regulation before becoming the culture secretary, he is said to use his legal background to get stuck into issues surrounding the “overarching duty of care”.

This contrasts to the previous culture secretary Matt Hancock, who was felt by tech companies and newspapers to have their side, adopting a pro-business and freedom of press stance while also being able to talk fluently about the nuances of certain apps and forms of tech regulation.

Despite Monday’s announcement, there’s little chance of any of the policies in the white paper becoming law in the near future. The scale of the issue will require substantial parliamentary time and even minor changes to online regulation – such as the much-delayed age verification system for legal online pornography – have taken years to be implemented.

There will now be a three-month consultation period before any draft law can be drawn up, with industry insiders expecting it will be years before any of the proposals are implemented.